IMPORTANT: No additional bug fixes or documentation updates will be released for this version. For the latest information, see the current release documentation.
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Elastic Docs ›Fleet and Elastic Agent Guide [8.2]

Install Elastic Agents

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Install Elastic Agents

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Elastic Agent is a single, unified way to add monitoring for logs, metrics, and other types of data to a host. It can also protect hosts from security threats, query data from operating systems, and more. A single agent makes it easy and fast to deploy monitoring across your infrastructure. Each agent has a single policy (a collection of input settings) that you can update to add integrations for new data sources, security protections, and more.

You can install only a single Elastic Agent per host.

You have a few options for installing and managing an Elastic Agent:

  • Install a Fleet-managed Elastic Agent (recommended)

    With this approach, you install Elastic Agent on each host you want to monitor and use Fleet in Kibana to define, configure, and manage your agents in a central location.

    We recommend using Fleet management because it makes the management and upgrade of your agents considerably easier.

    Refer to Install Fleet-managed Elastic Agents.

  • Install Elastic Agent in standalone mode (advanced users)

    With this approach, you install Elastic Agent on each host you want to monitor and manually configure the agent locally on the system where it’s installed. You are responsible for managing and upgrading the agents. This approach is reserved for advanced users only.

    Refer to Install standalone Elastic Agents (advanced users).

    Running Elastic Agent in standalone mode is an advanced use case. The documentation is incomplete and not yet mature. When possible, we recommend using Fleet-managed agents instead of standalone mode.

  • Install Elastic Agent in a containerized environment

    You can run Elastic Agent inside of a container — either with Fleet Server or standalone. Docker images for all versions of Elastic Agent are available from the Elastic Docker registry, and we provide deployment manifests for running on Kubernetes.

    Refer to:

Minimum Requirements

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Minimum requirements have been determined by running the Elastic Agent on a GCP e2-micro instance (2vCPU/1GB). The Elastic Agent used the default policy, running the system integration and self-monitoring.

CPU

Under 2% total, including all monitoring processes

Disk

420 MB

RSS Mem Size

700 MB

Adding integrations will increase the memory used by the agent and its processes.

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